Niva, which is developing a know-your-business (KYB) platform for cross-border commerce, has raised $3.3 million in seed funding, it tells Axios exclusively.
Why it's the BFD: Cross-border businesses must meet local and international KYB requirements, but the current manual process is time-consuming.
How it works: Niva's AI-driven platform integrates with its customers' onboarding flow and can automatically review businesses and either verify or send them for review.
- Its complete KYB solution is live in the U.S. and Mexico, and it plans to expand to Brazil in the coming months.
- The platform can generally verify businesses globally based on their online presence and public data sources.
The big picture: B2B transactions account for over $150 trillion, or around 97% of all cross-border payments.
- However, KYB compliance remains a complex problem due to the different languages, data sources and document formats that companies must use.
- "Ops teams are manually reviewing these businesses, looking at hundreds of pages of documents on each business ... and trying to figure out who the owners are today based on all that," Niva CEO Abhinav Rai says.
Between the lines: Rai says the company has benefitted immensely from the proliferation of generative AI models that enable Niva to handle different data types without building discrete models for each country.
- "This was almost impossible to solve, especially on a global scale, before all the new AI progress over the last two years," he says. "Suddenly, you can start looking at businesses across different countries and languages to start tackling different regulations."
Context: Before founding Niva, Rai was a general manager at SMB data startup Enigma, where he led development of its KYB product.
- His co-founder and CTO, Akhil Naini, was an engineering leader at Gusto, Coinbase and Chime.
Zoom in: Google's AI-focused VC fund Gradient Ventures led the financing, with Picus Capital, Canary and Gilgamesh Ventures also participating.
- Early customers include LatAm-focused SME financial services firm Xepelin and Mexican BNPL provider Aplazo.
